Читать книгу The Trickster - Muriel Gray, Muriel Gray - Страница 8

When he screamed, his lips slid so far up his teeth that the rarely exposed gum looked like shiny, flayed meat. Hunting Wolf’s eyes flicked open and stared. There was a semicircle of faces above him. Silent. Watching.

For a moment he stayed perfectly still, allowing himself to regain the feeling of being inside his body, that dull ache of reality after the lightness of the spirit’s escape. Then the numbing cold of the snow beneath his naked back stabbed at his skin, and mocked him with the knowledge that he was firmly back in the realm of the flesh.

Sweat was still trickling down his breast, beads of moisture clinging to his brown nipples like decoration, and he stared up at the grey, snow-laden sky in hot despair.

The faces looked on. They would not step forward to touch him or help him in this state. The shaman’s trance was sacred and they had no way of knowing when it would be over.

But it was over, now. He had looked into the thing’s face. Oh, Great Spirit, he had. And the filthy darkness, the bottomless malice he had seen there, had been nearly impossible to bear.

The white men gathered by the mountain were insane. He had seen that, too. Their madness, their folly.

And what could he do?

The shaman got up from the ground with a swiftness that surprised his audience of watchers, and walked away. The faces regarded him for a moment, and then, one by one, followed.